Radie Peat is often said to have the voice of a generation. Her singing voice, as you can hear on No Human Tongue Can Tell, her imminent first solo album, has a timbre that can connect viscerally with listeners. She has also influenced musicians across a wide spectrum.
Kneecap, whose albums Fine Art and Fenian she features on, refer to her as Banríon na hÉireann, or Queen of Ireland. The Dublin rapper and DJ Mango says she has influenced a whole generation of music.
Philip King, the broadcaster and musician who presides over the Other Voices festivals, tells me that, when she sings, Peat “inhabits the song entirely, and it’s not an act of rewriting the song but an act of renewal of songs that come out of the traditional canon”.
King quotes the Seamus Heaney poem At the Wellhead: “sing on, Dear shut-eyed one, dear far-voiced veteran, Sing yourself to where the singing comes from”.
“My sense is that Radie does that.”
If you said any of this to Peat, you might be met with an uncomfortable stare. She may have a magnetic stage presence, but she is also measured and thoughtful, talking seemingly without any sense of ego. (Even Daniel Archer’s photograph of her for the cover of the new album, on which Peat pulls nine old tunes into the contemporary, presents her in a soft blur.)
Peat’s music-making so far has been largely in collaborative contexts, including the low-key traditional-music sessions she plays at in Dublin.
As a member of Lankum, she’s a singer who gives the band a piercing duality of warmth and chill, which cut through and enhance the epic doom of their sound. Her concertina, harmonium and more – like her bandmates, she is a multi-instrumentalist – are essential parts of Lankum’s sonic palette.
With Øxn, Peat’s band with Katie Kim, Eleanor Myler and John “Spud” Murphy – Lankum’s producer, who also worked on this solo album – Peat is both a vocalist and a guitarist who draws from a wider range of instruments.
Peat says she was going for a “slightly darker version of Enya”, and certainly she renders the bleak beautiful. No Human Tongue Can Tell is at times sparse, at times lush, meditative and invigorating.
As a project, she had been thinking about the album for more than a decade. She was partly inspired by watching a documentary about Tubular Bells, the Mike Oldfield album from 1973: she wanted similarly to make an LP for which she could play all of the instruments, then layer them together on the recording.
“I felt the limitations of making it where it’s only things you can play or come up with would make it really unique,” she says. “You have your strengths, but you also have blind spots. It amplifies all of that.”
She was struck by an explanation she heard Brian Eno give about what makes good music. Part of it, he said, is to be working to a deadline; another can be to experiment with a new instrument.
”Sometimes when you get used to something,” Peat says, ”you have well-worn pathways in that area. So then, to put another instrument in your hand that you don’t really know how to use, you can get interesting stuff out of that.”
She plays about 10 instruments on the album.
Peat has been playing traditional music since she was five years old. When she was a young teenager growing up in Dublin, her parents began to bring her to play in pubs.
[ Kneecap: ‘These topics have been out of bounds for many years’Opens in new window ]
When she was 18 or 19 she realised that she had never been in a bar “just to drink pints. I realised I was drinking pints too fast because I didn’t have something else to do,” she says.
“I only realised later in life that was an unusual upbringing and that it wasn’t everybody’s upbringing. I’m super grateful for it.”
Her three sisters all play. Their parents, Peat says, encouraged them to express themselves creatively.
“There was never a question of whether this was worthwhile or worth your time. It was inherently, ‘Yes, it is. Creativity is worth your time,’ always. That was a really strong message from both my parents since I can remember.”
As a folk singer, Peat is a collector of songs. She mentions some that made it on to the album. One of the standouts is The Moon and Stars, which has “probably the weirdest provenance story”, Peat says, “because the rest of them, they generally speaking are folk songs I’ve changed a bit, whereas The Moon and the Stars I’ve changed a lot”.
The song’s form began as The Maid’s Lamenting, a tune Peat first heard the English folk musician Eliza Carthy sing on the fiddle.
“We were out having a few pints at a festival, playing music,” she says. “I just remembered one of the lines of it and thought, ‘That song’s great.’ I found it a couple of years later and, without really meaning to, I kept changing it. I just wanted to add a bit more drama, I think.”
About eight years ago, Peat was in a production of the John B Keane play Sive.
“I listened to the play every single night – matinees as well – for two months. There was this one line that just stuck in my head. It’s the matchmaker, and he’s talking, and it’s a rough night, kind of a weird atmosphere, the night that she dies, the young girl. This tragedy is about to happen.”
The line in the play is: “There’s a mad moon in the sky tonight with the stars out of their mind screeching and roaring at one another.”
Peat loved the imagery, and so the song took a turn.
Cailín Deas – the title is shortened from Cailín Deas Crúite na mBó, or The Pretty Girl Milking the Cows – is another highlight of the album (and its closing track). On it Peat plays a baritone concertina that’s about 150 years old.
“I feel like I’m Cormac Begley when I’m playing that,” she says. “But it is very wheezy because it’s very old. You can hear all the mechanics of it so much, all the clicks and all the breaths. It’s kind of struggling, like an old, old lady.”
Peat lauds Spud Murphy for his work on the album; she also mentions some other influences.
“I’ve been listening to Katie Kim’s music long before I met her, long before we were in a band together,” Peat says. “She’s a very big influence on me. I think she’s incredible. Her vocal layering is unbelievable. I was trying to go for a bit of that.
“And then the other thing I had in my head was – do you know this album Beth Gibbons did with Rustin Man?” she asks, referring to the Portishead singer’s LP Out of Season, which she made with Paul Webb, of Talk Talk. “I was thinking of that as well, this really soothing bed of vocals, ‘hmms’ and ‘umms’. Enya does that a lot. I love her.”
Then there’s Peat’s voice.
“I play a lot of reed instruments, and I think I’ve got a very reedy voice, actually,” Peat says.
It’s not something she dwells on, though.
“One of my sisters, if she was sitting here speaking, you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between us speaking, and you can’t tell the difference between us singing either. So, to me, I don’t know, I just reckon that’s a natural thing.”
Peat cites the sean-nós singer Róisín Chambers as someone whose voice she gravitated towards at school. But Traveller singers, including Mary Delaney, have influenced her more than sean-nós, she says. Nellie Weldon was also a big influence.
“But, to be honest, singing?” Peat says, shrugging. “Like, the instruments are something that’s an ongoing, forever obsession with me. I love instruments and trying out new ones, or just new ways of playing the same ones, all that kind of thing.
“I think about that a lot, and put a lot of time into that, whereas the singing I don’t think about. I find it’s better the less I think about it. What I think about when I’m singing is the emotions I’m trying to communicate, or the story, or the world.
“I try to go into the world and don’t worry about it being good or bad, perfectly smooth or anything, and just try to communicate ... It’s a totally emotional thing for me, to sing. It’s not cerebral at all.”
Lankum’s most recent release, in the autumn of 2025, was an epic curveball in the form of an eight-minute cover version of the Specials song Ghost Town.
In a strange way it’s Lankum at their finest, less of a song than a spell. In a world of algorithmically driven hooks, and artists encouraged to churn out social-media content, Lankum are brilliantly uncompromising. The more abstruse they get, the more their audience applauds, and the larger the crowd grows.
“It was totally unpredictable this amount of people would want to hear the very esoteric music we make. It’s challenging. It’s dark,” she says. “I could never have predicted that other people would actually like it. It felt so ‘just for us’, and potentially only limited to the tiny Venn diagram of our interests. So it has been constantly surprising that other people engage with it.”
Peat likes to think one of the reasons people connect with Lankum is because they understand, at least on some level, the band’s motivation.
“Our intentions were very pure,” she says. “We just wanted to make things we wanted to listen to. We didn’t make it for anybody else. We just suited ourselves and made what we wanted to make. Maybe people can hear that, and they can hear that it’s honest.”
She finds it hard, immersed as she is in it, to perceive her role, and that of Lankum as a whole, in the flourishing of Irish culture, but she is excited by what she sees happening.
“Huge credit is due to Kneecap with the Irish language, that people are learning it and speaking it more and it’s becoming more part of daily life,” she says.
“The interest in folklore, Manchán Magan’s work paved the way for a lot of that. I love his books. I think they’re amazing.
“And also the designers – Pearl Reddington, Jennifer Slattery, Simone Rocha, Robyn Lynch, even Pellador. They’re referencing old Irish textiles and design. I see it as all the same thing.”
Peat is energised by the idea that more people in Ireland are concluding that “our culture is good, it’s rich – and we’ve managed to keep it going despite so much interference. We’ve managed to keep these things alive, and we should be proud of that, and they’re not something to recoil at”.
She poses a big question – “Why does anyone make music?” – then answers it herself.
“When you make music you’re trying to communicate something that you essentially can’t communicate in another way. It is a medium of communication. Especially, I think, emotional communication. It is abstract...
“I feel that’s the point of it. If I’ve done my job properly, I shouldn’t need to explain.”
No Human Tongue Can Tell is released by Rough Trade Records on Friday, November 13th; Radie Peat plays Vicar Street, in Dublin, on Friday, November 20th
Source: The Irish Times · Una Mullally
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